What is the future of 3DTV?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you’ll have heard of the coming of 3D TV. We’ve had it at cinemas long enough for it to become mainstream and the adoption of 3D by Sky for its higher-level subscriptions threatens to bring it right into households much quicker than I expected. Samsung’s offering a decent 50″ 3DTV with three sets of 3D glasses for under £1000, within a year we’ll be seeing excellent televisions in the 40″ range for a few hundred pounds less than that.

But do we really want it? With HDTV there’s a clear difference between the quality of a given medium and the difference in quality and resulting enjoyment is probably greater than that between DVD and VHS. Is this the case with 3DTV? No, not yet. The greatest uses of 3D in cinema are shock moments (weapon/car flying out from the screen), popping vistas (eg sweeps of buildings) and the like. Adding general depth is not something valued by the general public. Or is it?

The answer will come this time next year as more households adopt 3DTVs. With games consoles, TVs and PCs now embracing 3D – Call of Duty: Black Ops will allow 3D playing – it looks like the media-makers have made up their minds.

Hey guys, yes like many of you I’m an early adopter and I love new technology. Just a brief note today – I had problems with the iPad’s cellular data (3G) on o2. I couldn’t find a way to set up an account to start a 3G service. But I found the solution and it was an easy one: plug your iPad into iTunes and update. I’d already plugged it in the first time I used it without any update so it may be new. You’ll get an update to your cellular data settings which will give you the option of setting up an account.

Easy peasy.

Saw this video on Engadget showcasing the work of Konttori – he’s got SNES emulation working on the N900 OS (Maemo) and he’s got it hooked up to both the TV and a Wii-mote. As aardWolf on Engadget says:

Ha! So he tweaked it to run on a TV with the Wiimote. Now if he could only stick it in a dedicated box with power so it didn’t run off of batteries.

Nintendo could make a ton of money selling it… We could call it the “Wii”.

Here’s the video and the author’s blog: